Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment Monday accusing a man and woman of training the woman's child to be a dominatrix, selling her sexual services and photographing some of the acts....
Todd B. Barkau, 35, of New York state, and the 44-year-old mother were charged in the seven-count indictment. They once lived together in Blue Springs, Mo., where the sex business was allegedly run.... The indictment says Barkau began training the girl in 2000 when she was 12, and forced her to engage in sex acts with him and with other men. According to the indictment, he also had the girl watch pornography on the Internet as a teaching tool.
Barkau is accused of creating a business out of the couple's Missouri home when the girl was 14 and marketing her as a 19-to-20-year-old dominatrix on the Internet for about two years.
The mother is charged with encouraging and participating in the venture, the indictment says.
That experience had to traumatizing for this child—now a 20 year-old woman—but just imagine how much more traumatizing it would have been if the child hadn't have had a male and a female role model in the home.
Thanks to Slog tipper Corinne.
UPDATE:
Oh, kids. I get sent so many links to stories like this one, and I post so very, very few of them. They really have to rise to the level of blah blah blah. And the anti-gay ranters that insist that every child deserves a mother and a father aren't just arguing for kids to remain with their biological parents. They argue that, in those tragic instances when a kid child can't be raised by one or both of his or her biological parents, that child absolutely, positively, GOD ALMIGHTY, just hasta be placed in a household with one male and one female role model. If that doesn't happen—if a child is placed with, say, a pair of fit, sane, screened, home-studied, and qualified same-sex parents—why, that's as good as child abuse.
I'm sorry that these posts annoy some readers. You are free to play spot the header and scroll on by. But the debate over same-sex parents rages just below, it seems, whatever pitch or tone is required for many straight people to hear it. "Yeah, yeah—we get it, Dan! Enough already!" Yeah, yeah—I get it, it's annoying. It's supposed to be. And these posts will cease when the smearing of same-sex parents ceases or is met with howls of outrage from all quarters.